I'm excited to announce a new PKD-related course through Morbid Anatomy. This time I'll be diving deep into Clans of the Alphane Moon with special guest Jonathan Lethem! Instead of a mind-destroying 16 week marathon, this is a simple one week, two session class. 
Here's my class description: 

In 1963 Philip K Dick's third marriage was crumbling, his idyllic life in the small northern California town of Pt Reyes Station was coming to a sad and dysfunctional end, and the author was relying on increasingly large doses of amphetamines to supercharge his writing output.

During this chaotic period in his life, Dick wrote one of his most "out there" science fiction novels: Clans of the Alphane Moon.

The "Clans" in Dick's novel are tribes of psychiatric patients organized around their diagnoses: "pares," or paranoiacs, comprise the leadership, "manses" or those suffering from mania, live amid "a hodgepodge of incomplete projects, started out but never finished," the "skitzes," or schizophrenics, comprise a village of disheveled poets.

Dick's microcosm of mental illness functions not as a bleak dystopia, but as best-selling author Jonathan Lethem explained in his keynote address to the Philip K Dick Fest in Fort Morgan Colorado last summer, a vision of diversity that lights the way out of the dark times we find ourselves in.

Join leading Philip K. Dick scholar David Gill and Jonathan Lethem for a two-session class on Dick's novel and his life at the time of its composition. Survey the weirdness of one of Dick's strangest books and discover his proffered solution to our troubled times.

The class starts March 31st. More info at Morbid Anatomy.

We're less than a week away from Dick-Fest 2024. In fact, you'll find some pretty detailed info and a schedule here, which is otherwise dedicated to our series dedicated to getting to know the presenters at this year's Fest. So, without further ado, is my interview with Gabriel Mckee: 

What are you gonna talk about at the fest?

 I'll be talking about ideas of control and freedom in the Exegesis, particularly as they relate to the concept of "astral determinism" in Hellenistic religion and philosophy-- the idea that human destiny is controlled by external forces (in particular, the stars and planets). The starting point of my talk is sections of the Exegesis where Phil is talking about the dreaded "Xerox missive," which took on a central importance in his understanding of what liberation meant. The idea of breaking free from the path that the universe has prepared for you-- metaphorized as "groove override" in the universe's eternal LP-- is an absolutely crucial one in the Exegesis, and the concrete example Phil is talking about is his reaction to the weird photocopy he got in the mail. After a career of writing about androids who think they're human, Phil found himself mired in anxiety over the idea that he was subject to some kind of external control-- but that he had pushed through and found himself experiencing a sense of freedom when he didn't look at the letter, didn't do whatever destructive thing it was that it was intended to bring about. I don't think it really matters what the true origin or content of the letter was; it's mainly important for having become a symbol through which Phil explored themes of fate/destiny/programming and freedom/choice/liberation.  I look at this through the lens of modern ideas--particularly Jay Kinney's concept of "agency panic"-- and ancient ones-- early Christian and Hellenistic texts about astrological control.

How'd you get involved in Dickdom? 

PKD was one of the first SF authors I read when I started getting into the genre toward the end of high school. A friend lent me a copy of VALIS and I was instantly obsessed. It got me interested not just in science fiction, but in religion and theology as well. I was active on the old Jazzflavor email list and ended up studying religion as an undergraduate and going on to a master's from Harvard Divinity School-- along the way writing Pink Beams of Light From the God in the Gutter: The Science-Fictional Religion of Philip K. Dick (University Press of America, 2004), and the PKD-adjacent The Gospel According to Science Fiction (Westminster John Knox, 2007) shortly thereafter. When I heard that Jonathan Lethem and Pamela Jackson were working on an edited version of the Exegesis back in 2010, I knew I had to be involved-- and am grateful to Erik Davis and Rich Doyle for helping to facilitate that. 

What kind of Dick-related work are you currently involved in? 

I've just finished a major non-PKD project that I have been working on for several years: The Saucerian: The Unbelievable Life of Gray Barker, a biography of a prolific UFO book author, publisher, and showman, which is due out early next year from MIT Press. I'm contributing smaller pieces to a couple other PKD projects, including George Sieg & Michael Barros's edited volume The Esoteric Theology of Philip K. Dick (forthcoming from Lexington Books) and Keith Giles and David Agranoff's Dickapedia. I've also been an active collaborator in the Zebrapedia project since its inception, and have been talking to Rich Doyle about ways to enhance the online Exegesis interface-- I hope to have some more news to share at the Fest about coming developments there. 

 

News broke last week of another Phil Dick adaptation in the pipeline. This time it's a version of Phil's awesome time-travel story, "A Little Something for Us Tempunauts" being adapted by actor Michael B. Jordan's Outlier Society production company in conjunction with Isa Dick Hackett's Electric Sheep Productions, natch. 

From Deadline: "Outlier Society is developing the Amazon MGM Studios action thriller movie, T-Minus, which is being co-scripted by Fall Guy's Drew Pearce and Watchmen and Station Eleven scribe Nick Cuse."

"The project was initially developed by Pearce's banner Point of No Return Films. Outlier Society's Elizabeth Raposo heard the pitch—said to be an action-thriller along the lines of "Top Gun meets Back to the Future, with a Philip K. Dick twist"—and saw the potential for it to be the perfect Outlier project: an elevated piece with major tentpole potential."

"MAJOR tentpole potential" -- now that's what you want from a Dick movie!